Get Outta Your Head: An Interview With Ming City R*ckers

Regular readers of this blog might remember a post from earlier in the year called Mo-dettes (& Ming City Rockers) which featured the latter act’s second single, I Wanna Get Out Of Here but I Can’t Take You Anywhere.

Since then Ming City R*ckers have went from strength to strength, with increasing numbers of converts identifying with their on-stage passion, outsider attitude and, of course, their caustic lyrics and bludgeoning, hook-laden songs.

The band may wear Oxfam black suits, white shirts and the skinniest of skinny black ties but they also have a liking for eyeliner and singer Clancey has Russell Brand hair, together they look as if they’ve tried to combine goth and glam metal with mod, while musically they fuse elements of punk, blues and R&B into their own scuzzy and exhilarating brand of modern day rock’n’roll.

Here’s the new single, Get Outta Your Head:

Recorded in a week at Sheffield’s Tesla Studios, the Mings’ self-titled debut album is out on the fifteenth of September and so far advance reviews have been highly favourable with Mojo saluting their ‘live-fast, die-young romanticism’ and Q praising their ‘slash’n’burn intensity’.

The praise is definitely deserved. Ming City R*ckers is a collection of ten of their own numbers along with a cover of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads and each song is amphetamine paced with vicious basslines, great clattering drums and guitar riffs that aim straight for the jugular, while Clancey always manages to sound mightily pissed off whether complaining about crap relationships (Rosetta); life generally being so crap that you need to blot out as much of it as possible (Get Outta Your Head) or bemoaning living in a crap small town, the aforementioned I Wanna Get Out Of Here but I Can’t Take You Anywhere.

Small town blues is a theme that the band seldom stray too far from and they do a nice line in putting down their home town Immingham, never missing the chance to point out that Ming City, as it’s apparently nicknamed, is best known for its massive petrochemical plant and that the most ‘famous’ person to have ever lived there was Soham murderer Ian Huntley. Suffice to say, it’s unlikely that many employees of the Lincolnshire Tourist Board will be numbered amongst their growing fanbase.

Ming City R*ckers strikes this listener as entirely authentic, as if they collectively came to the conclusion while holed up in the studio that the opportunity to make a kick-ass album might just be their best shot at escaping a grim future in a Britain of zero hour contracts and benefits sanctions.

Not that this necessarily meant they weren’t also hellbent on having some fun at the same time.

No, but it’s always in those fucking backwards small towns where women are short, fat, bleached and orange and the men are angry and dickless from the constant injecting of steroids. I guess Morley and Jakki don’t fit that description so some people get confused.

The album’s only half an hour long but I like to see that as a positive. Life’s too short for fillers, eh?

Absolutely. We wanted to make an album where people wouldn’t have to skip past songs they don’t like. We only put songs we thought were fucking ace on the album.

Why should people buy Ming City R*ckers?

Because the combination of our album and a bottle of Frosty Jack’s is better than sex.

There seems to be some kind of new wave of straight-ahead guitar bands like yourselves, what do you think of acts like Fat White Family and The Amazing Snakeheads?

It’s cool to see bands that don’t play that same old generic indie shit.

Who are you listening to at the moment?

Sleaford Mods, Bass Drum of Death, Palma Violets and The Franceens.

And which acts do you really hate?

You can’t really hate someone’s music that they’ve worked hard to write and play and whatnot. It’s either to your taste of it’s not.

Is it true the band are Magma fans?

Only half of us like Magma, the other half it’s y’know… not to their taste. You’ve gotta admit you’ve never heard a band like Magma. They obviously don’t give a fuck what people think, that’s cool.

When are you bringing your skinny asses up to play in Scotland? You’d be great in a venue like King Tut’s or Nice N Sleazy in Glasgow.

Someone book us for a show! We’d love to play in Scotland. We wanna try that Snake Venom beer.

What does the future hold for Ming City R*ckers?

Death by misadventure.

Good luck with the album and hopefully a promoter lines something up in Scotland soon. And finds some Snake Venom beer for your rider!

This is track 6 on the album, their debut single Chic and the Motherfuckers:

Doubt they’re the future of rock but they do what they do very well and they seem to have a sense of humour so fair play to them. I see as well that the Specials have Sleaford Mods as support on thier tour so must make sure to catch them.